Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
Much of the political history of twentieth-century America was a battle over the extent of government regulation. Historians generally agree that the spirit of Progressive reform temporarily died out after World War I, and it is no surprise that this period also sees the end of the kind of immigration regulation practiced at Ellis Island for three decades. This regulatory approach to immigration would be replaced by the blunt instrument of immigration quotas by the 1920s. This new mechanism would not try to sift desirable from undesirable immigrants, but instead severely limit immigrants based on where they came from. America did not completely shut down immigration from Europe, as it had done earlier to immigration from China, but the era of mass immigration was effectively ended. Ellis Island had lost its raison d’être.
When a new spirit of reform came with the New Deal and the federal government again began to intervene actively in the private sector, immigration was left out of the equation. The nation’s conflicting views toward government power would find itself mirrored in its immigration laws.
Ellis Island would become little more than a prison for enemy aliens during World War II and for noncitizen aliens with radical beliefs during the Cold War. In the flush of postwar prosperity, the government abandoned Ellis Island in 1954 and left it to rot. Not until the 1980s, when the nation began to witness the rise of a new era of mass migration, did the country again pay attention to Ellis Island. By then, the former inspection station had evolved into an emotional symbol to millions of Americans, a new Plymouth Rock. Parts of the old facility were rehabilitated and reopened as a museum of immigration history. Ellis Island had now entered the realm of historical memory.
T
HIS BOOK IS A
biography, not of a person, but of a place, of one small island in New York Harbor that crystallized the nation’s complex and contradictory ideas about how to welcome people to the New World. It traces the history of Ellis Island from its days of hosting pirate hangings in the nineteenth century to its heyday as America’s main immigration station where some 12 million immigrants were inspected from 1892 to 1924. The story continues through the detention of aliens at Ellis Island during World War II and the Cold War and concludes with its rebirth as an immigration museum and a national icon. Long after Ellis Island has ceased to be an inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it continue to be heard.
Today, Ellis Island has become a tired cliché for some, a story about the pluck and perseverance of those “poor huddled masses yearning to be free” who found freedom at the end of the inspection line. It is a nostalgic ode to our hardy ancestors who achieved success in spite of their experiences at the infamous Isle of Tears, where bigoted officials made their lives miserable and changed the family’s name from something with six syllables and no vowels to Smith.
In reality, Ellis Island was the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for more than three decades. Inspectors, doctors, and political appointees wrestled every day with the problems of interpreting the nation’s immigration laws while being personally confronted with hundreds of thousands of living, breathing individuals. The dry enterprise of executing the law came into direct conflict with the mass of humanity seeking to make new lives in America.
Ellis Island embodies the story of Americans grappling with how best to manage the vast and disruptive changes brought by rapid industrialization and large-scale immigration from Europe. It is the story of a nation struggling with the idea of what it meant to be an American at a time when millions of newcomers from vastly different backgrounds were streaming into the country.
Americans need a history that does not glorify the place in some kind of gauzy, self-congratulatory nostalgia, nor mindlessly condemn what occurred there as the vicious bigotry of ugly nativists. Instead, this book seeks to understand what happened at Ellis Island and why it happened.
This island, so small in size, has imprinted itself on the minds of so many Americans. It is a gritty and tumultuous history, but one that helps to explain why millions of immigrants had to make their American Passage through Ellis Island and how that passage in turn helped shape this nation.
FIFTY THOUSAND NEW YORKERS CL OGGED THE INTERsection of Second Avenue and 13th Street on the afternoon of April 2, 1824. Nearly one-third of the city’s population was there to witness the public hanging of a convicted murderer named John Johnson.
City officials were not happy with the scene. They were less concerned about the question of whether a civilized city should play host to such a gruesome event than they were about the gridlock created by the public spectacle. The city would later order future executions moved to nearby Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). But the public could not get enough. At the next execution, they arrived in boats so numerous they shut down river traffic and caused a number of boating accidents. The city council then ordered that all future executions take place in the city prison, out of public view.
The city did not have jurisdiction over all executions. The crime of piracy on the high seas was a federal offense and common enough to occupy the minds of federal authorities. While the city banned public executions, the federal government continued to offer such grotesque displays to New Yorkers for a few more years on a small island it controlled in the harbor. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers knew the place as Gibbet Island, but under another name it would later become one of the most famous islands in the nation: Ellis Island. However, its early history can best be described as ignominious.
Pirates bring to mind images of eye-patched swashbucklers, skulland-crossbones flags, and loads of treasure, but real-life piracy was a more mundane, if still violent, pastime. When caught for their crimes, pirates often faced a death sentence. Pirate hangings were not merely about punishment; they were also about deterrence. After death, the damned would be hung in iron chains for an unspecified time, a warning to those who would dare wreak havoc and chaos on the commerce of the seas. The post on which the dead bodies were hung was called a gibbet, hence the island’s chilling name.
When Washington Irving published his great satire of New York history under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, he included a number of references to Gibbet Island. Mixing real history with myth, he wrote of a settler named Michael Paw who, according to Irving, “lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia and the lands away south, even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island.” While Paw probably did own the area, the three-acre rock and sand island granted him little by way of power or prestige and was not a possession of which to boast.
Gibbet Island and the legend of pirate hangings also eerily appear in another Irving tale, “Guests from Gibbet Island.” In this ghost story, two pirates row out to Gibbet Island and find three of their fellow conspirators “dangling in the moonlight, their rags fluttering, and their chains creaking, as they were slowly swung backward and forward by the rising breeze.” When one of the pirates returns home, waiting for him are “the three guests from Gibbet Island, with halters round their necks, and bobbing their cups together.” The other living pirate would soon die, his body found “stranded among the rocks of Gibbet Island, near the foot of the pirates’ gallows.”
Pirate hangings on Gibbet Island were more than the stuff of ghost stories. Just after noon on June 11, 1824, a black sailor named Thomas Jones was hanged at Gibbet Island for his part in the murder of his ship’s captain and first mate. “There appears to be no doubt on the mind of those who attended him, that he has gone to the realms above,” according to a pamphlet written just after Jones’s execution. “He closed his life leaving to the world a past example of a great sinner, and also a proof of the richness of divine grace, and the willingness of Jesus Christ to save sinners.”
By the time of Jones’s hanging, the guilty were no longer left on gibbets, but the public still needed to draw lessons from these executions. Rather than being a lesson of vengeance, these widely distributed pamphlets emphasized the notion of Christian redemption, as the accused always repents of his sins and accepts the salvation of Jesus Christ. The pamphlets not only provided the public with gruesome accounts of murder and piracy, but also a soothing tale in which even the most wicked criminals confessed their sins before death in order to save their souls from eternal damnation.
A similar tale was told when William Hill was hanged at Gibbet Island two years later. But the Hill case was decidedly different from that of Jones. Both men were black, but while Jones was a freeman and a sailor, Hill was a twenty-four-year-old Maryland slave arrested after an unsuccessful escape attempt. Frederick Douglass, once a Baltimore slave, described what happened to Maryland slaves who misbehaved: “If a slave was convicted of any high misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.” That is what happened to William Hill.
On the night of April 20, 1826, Austin Woolfolk placed Hill and thirty other slaves bound in chains on the
Decatur
. From Baltimore, the ship would sail for New Orleans, where the slaves would be sold off to work on the large plantations of the Deep South. Rather than accept their fate, Jones and a number of other slaves managed to free themselves, take control of the ship, and throw the ship’s captain and first mate overboard. It is a tale familiar to readers of Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” or viewers of the movie
Amistad
.
The slave mutineers were captured, but only Hill was convicted for the crime. He felt no malice toward the murdered captain, but said he and his fellow mutineers were only seeking their freedom. In fact, he felt so bad about his role in the captain’s death that he wished that he had jumped overboard himself rather than kill another man.
On December 15, 1826, Hill was sent to Gibbet Island to face death. According to one account, “All the way in the Steam Boat, to his place of Execution, he appeared to be perfectly resigned to God; and continually praying and singing—On his arriving at the island, he was showed his Coffin; he said that was only for my body not for my Soul; that has gone to GLORY, with my beloved Saviour.”
Present at the execution was Austin Woolfolk. While on the gallows, Hill spied the slave trader and in his final words on Earth forgave Woolfolk and said he hoped they would meet again in heaven. In response, Woolfolk cursed the doomed man saying he was going to get what he deserved. Members of the crowd, shocked at Woolfolk’s outburst, quieted him down. Then, the slave-turned-pirate was “launched into eternity.”
More executions followed. The most famous were the dual hangings of pirates Charles Gibbs and Thomas Walmsley in 1831. On a spring day in April, the harbor was again filled with boats whose passengers badly wanted to witness the executions. Gibbet Island was “crowded with men and women and children—and on the waters around, were innumerable boats, laden with passengers, from the steamboat and schooner, down to the yawl and canoe.” In the chaos of the crowded harbor, a few boats were overturned.
Confusion reigned. The
Commercial Advertiser
noted that it had received a call from a man who had given one of his clerks the day off to watch the execution and that clerk had not been heard from since. The
Workingman’s Advocate
also ran a notice about the mysterious disappearance of a thirty-six-year-old man who left his house the day of the hangings and never returned. His friends assumed that he went to the harbor to witness the executions and drowned. It is unclear whether either man actually drowned or whether they were just playing hooky from work, but an unidentified dead body was found the following day floating up to the Coffee House Slip at the foot of Wall Street.
Gibbs was a white man in his midthirties, reputedly from a respectable Rhode Island family. By one exaggerated account, Gibbs and his men were responsible for capturing more than twenty ships and murdering almost four hundred people. Gibbs, Walmsley, a twenty-threeyear-old stout mulatto, and their accomplices took control of the ship
Vineyard
in November 1830, killing the captain and first mate. Making off with the money on board, they grounded the ship off the coast of Long Island and headed ashore. Three of the conspirators drowned before making it to land. Gibbs and Walmsley were soon arrested and fingered as the ringleaders by one of their colleagues who seemed unhappy with his share of the stolen loot.
At the trial, Walmsley, who had been the ship’s steward, seemed to make the case for his innocence, pointing to racial prejudice. “I have often understood that there is a great deal of difference in respect of color, and I have seen it in this Court,” he testified. Nevertheless, on April 22, 1831, Gibbs and Walmsley, according to one account, “paid the forfeit which the laws demand from those who perpetrate such crimes as they have been convicted of.” Speaking to the gathered crowd at Gibbet Island, Gibbs addressed the crowd from the gallows for nearly a half hour. Both men acknowledged the justice of their death sentences. Rather than being dropped from a scaffold, the two men were killed by being slung up on a rope, on whose other end was tied heavy weights. While Walmsley died almost immediately, Gibbs suffered a much slower and more painful death because the knot on his neck had not been properly placed.
Their dead bodies swung on the gallows for nearly an hour, after which they were handed over to surgeons for autopsies. Before the surgeons took the bodies, a sculptor took a cast of Gibbs’s head so that phrenologists could “examine minutely the skull of one of the greatest murderers ever known.” Phrenologists believed that measuring the size and shape of skulls would reveal the character and mental capacity of the individual.
The island’s last execution occurred on June 21, 1839, when New Yorkers watched a pirate named Cornelius Wilhelms die. It would be their last chance to witness such a horrific spectacle at Gibbet Island, although two decades later some ten thousand New Yorkers, most in boats, would come to nearby Bedloe’s Island to watch the hanging of pirate Albert Hicks.
By the end of the nineteenth century, pirate hangings were a thing of the past and both Bedloe’s Island and Gibbet Island would be transformed from their earlier dubious history into America’s mythic historical pantheon. By then, on the site of the gallows from which Albert Hicks was hanged, would stand the base of the Statue of Liberty. Gibbet Island would shed its notorious name and history and revert back to a previous name: Ellis Island. By the late 1800s, it would attract many more people than had ever come to witness a pirate execution.
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY IS
an archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River, the handiwork of a glacier thousands of years ago. It is an island empire consisting of nearly six hundred miles of shoreline. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the mainland. There are some forty islands in addition to Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. These minor islands are nestled in the bays, rivers, harbor, and other waterways that encase the city. One of the largest, Roosevelt Island, is a city within a city, 2 miles long and 800 feet wide, with a population of over eight thousand. Just south of its tip is one of the city’s smallest islands, measuring just 100 feet by 200 feet and named for former secretary of the United Nations U Thant.
Many of the city’s islands once served important social functions and some still do. As the city grew northward up the island of Manhattan, along with it came the pesky social problems that afflict any budding metropolis. Under such circumstances, these islands became
cordons sanitaires
, in the words of writer Phillip Lopate, “where the criminal, the insane, the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute . . . were quarantined.” It is no surprise that they were also handy places for pirate hangings.
Among these exile islands were Hart Island, which became the city’s largest potter’s field, the last resting spot for the anonymous poor; Blackwell’s Island, which once housed a mental hospital for prisoners, as well as a city hospital; North Brother Island, where a hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases was “Typhoid Mary” Mallon’s home for nearly three decades; Ward’s Island, the site of more mental institutions; and Rikers Island, which is still a city jail, with nearly fifteen thousand inmates housed in ten buildings, one of the largest such facilities in the country.
In upper New York Harbor, just a few hundred yards from the shore of New Jersey, sits Ellis Island. During the last Ice Age, a thick blanket of ice covered most of New York. When the glaciers beat a retreat some twelve thousand years ago, they left behind a big marshland dotted with pockets of high ground. The coastline was some hundred miles farther out in the Atlantic. Much of what is harbor and sea today was once dry land. A person could have strolled from today’s Ellis Island to neighboring Liberty Island to the high ground of Staten Island and not have gotten his feet wet.
As the waters continued to rise, the harbor was formed and much of the high ground became New York’s islands. Today Ellis Island consists of around twenty-seven acres, but for much of its modern history it was little less than a three-acre bank of sand and mud—“by estimation to high water mark, two acres, three roods, and thirty-five perches”—that barely kept its head above high tide.
Seals, whales, and porpoises once swam in the waters near the island. And then there were the oysters. New York Harbor and the lower Hudson River were once home to 350 square miles of fertile oyster beds, supplying more than half of the world’s oysters. They were prized as delicacies, while cheap and abundant enough to be a staple of the workingman’s diet. A 1730 map of New York harbor shows the entire Jersey shore section of the harbor to be “one gigantic oyster reef.”
In deference to the edible treasures that could be found in the waters surrounding the sandy outcrop, European colonists named the tiny island in the harbor Little Oyster Island, while its larger neighbor was dubbed Great Oyster Island.